AZ-500 retired: which security certification to prepare

Identity, networking, protecting compute and data, Defender for Cloud and Sentinel are still valuable skills. The retirement affects the credential; it does not make that knowledge obsolete.

Keep your labs and change the goal: prove cloud security with a current certification or with verifiable projects.

If you specialize in identity and access, the natural option is SC-300 (Identity and Access Administrator), which covers Entra ID, Conditional Access, PIM and governance. If you work in security operations and incident investigation, compare SC-200. For architecture, governance or multicloud security, check Microsoft's current catalog and the profile of each credential.

The right path depends on your daily work, not on which one shares the most questions with AZ-500. Always confirm that the exam is active and review its most recent official guide.

Protect a lab subscription with least-privilege RBAC, Key Vault, network segmentation, Defender for Cloud and alerts. Document a threat, the preventive control, the detection signal and the response. That turns the old outline into practical evidence you can carry to any interview or certification.

AZ-500 is no longer in the catalog: we do not offer preparation for an exam that cannot be booked. If your next step is identity, the SC-300 page has practice by domain and 10 free questions with no sign-up; the article How to pass SC-300 proposes a four-week plan.